Back in the day, I considered myself somewhat of a back-to-school organizer extraordinaire.
With days to go before the doors were opened to the classrooms, the kids would have had their new shoes, their new haircuts and their new backpacks.
More importantly, I had the key to organizational success at the ready. It was a corkboard. It was nailed to a wall of the kitchen and it was a blank canvas of sorts. It has pushpins, but that was it.
The corkboard — oh, I thought I was brilliant! — was there to welcome the mounds of paperwork that would soon be headed my way: notices about field trips and school supplies and timetables and science projects and picture days and hot-dog lunches and who knows what else.
Bring it on, I thought at the time. I’m more than ready to deal with this.
As I say, that was right about now.
It started out all well and good. I pinned field trip notices to the top right-hand corner of the corkboard, the timetables to their left and the lunch forms beneath.
I felt pretty darned proud of myself.
Two weeks in, however, and the paperwork became a bit of a mishmash, the odd school supply form tucked in with the project paperwork and the picture-day notices nowhere to be found.
A month later, and the inevitable: the corkboard, heaving with disorder, decided it could no longer do the job and came crashing to the floor.
So much for good intentions.
These days, however, stationery stores everywhere have upped the ante where organization is concerned.
Walk into one of them and you’ll find more than the corkboard on offer.
WE’RE BACK-TO-SCHOOL CENTRAL! one of them is screaming at the moment. The store in question — I happened to be there the other day because I needed some file folders — was mobbed with back-to-schoolers and their parents. They were loading up on multi-coloured wipe-off boards and multi-coloured planners and multi-coloured calendars. They were grabbing multi-coloured Post-It Notes and multi-coloured storage boxes and multi-coloured notebooks and multi-coloured shelving units.
The parents, I imagined, would be using said materials to design back-to-school zones in their homes. They would have plenty of signage and plenty of space, and perhaps even be staffed by someone there to collect the students’ projects, forms, notices and announcements and place them in the appropriate receiving stations.
Man, oh, man.
Times, they have changed when it comes to back-to-school organization. Given today’s standards, I would not be considered extraordinary.
A corkboard wouldn’t cut it at all. Unless, perhaps, I had six.
